The Broken Eye

by Brent Weeks

  The commander hadn’t been amused. As always, he was on his way somewhere more important. He lifted the woman in front of him—and it’s not easy to look seductive when a man lifts you by the armpits—stared her hard in the eye until she nearly wet herself, and dropped her off to the side without a word.

  It had kept that woman from ever trying it again, but had backfired where others were concerned.

  Teia grinned at the memory and finally emerged from the market. She wasn’t even sure where she was now. Not that it was possible to get truly lost on Big Jasper. She put her hands in her pockets—Blackguard trousers had pockets. She loved them.

  There was a note there.

  She pulled it out, and a hollow formed in her stomach. Fine flash paper, of course. If she tried to simply open it—or anyone else tampered with it—it would burn up in an instant. She wondered if Karris had been good enough to pass her the orders herself, or if she had people to do that now.

  She tore into the bottom right corner, edged the tear around the left side like she’d been taught, and finally opened the note: “Kip is going to be assassinated on a raid, today. Most likely by a Blackguard. Several, possibly. They’ll be at the docks before noon. Save him.” It was in Karris’s hand.

  Teia’s breath caught. The docks. The squad’s current safe house was on the way. She ran.

  In minutes, she arrived at the safe house. She knocked the code rapidly on the wood, and then opened the door. Cruxer was alone inside, seating a new flint in the cockjaw of his pistol. He looked up. He frowned as soon as he saw the expression on her face. “What’s going on, Teia?”

  “Kip. It’s Kip. He’s going to be murdered. We have to go help!” Teia said.

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Now, Crux!”

  Chapter 64

  Kip was sitting at his desk with mounds of books threatening to bury him when someone knocked on his door. It could only be Tisis Malargos. Kip had been preparing for this since he’d left the old man’s room. He still wasn’t ready.

  The truth was, Kip didn’t really know Tisis. Sure, she’d pretended that she was going to kill him during his Threshing. Sure, she’d single-handedly made him fail by giving him back the bell rope after he’d thrown it away, but perhaps Kip shouldn’t take it personally. He was starting to understand what it was to inherit the enmities of your people. How could it have been personal? She’d never even met him before that day.

  And of course, Kip had later killed her uncle. That kind of made them even, didn’t it?

  He got up, braced himself, and opened the door.

  It wasn’t Tisis. It was two Blackguards, Buskin and Lytos, looking almost like a comedy, Buskin was so short and Lytos was so tall. But they weren’t smiling.

  “Know how we been searching the seas?” Buskin asked.

  “For my father?” Kip asked eagerly.

  “No,” Lytos said at the same time Buskin said, “Yes.”

  They shot a look at each other.

  “No need to keep it from him if he knows,” Buskin said. “Some of us go looking for the bane, and some of us go looking for the Prism. It’s supposed to be secret.”

  “My grand—the promachos told me about it,” Kip said. “And he said I’d get a chance to go.”

  “This ain’t that. With so many of us full Blackguards training everyone, Watch Captain Fisk has got us dipping into the nunks to help look for bane. Your number came up.”

  “Watch Captain Fisk?” Kip said. “You mean Trainer Fisk?”

  “You’d know about his promotion and the schedule if you bothered coming to practice more often,” Lytos said in his odd eunuch’s tenor.

  Fisk had been promoted to Karris’s old position as watch captain? That was a small disaster. Fisk had worked with Andross to try to keep Kip out of the Blackguard. For all the times he’d seemed friendly, he was a traitor at the core.

  “How long we going to be gone?” Kip asked.

  Lytos said, “Back before dark. They don’t want the nunks missing any training—any more training, maybe I should say—so you all don’t do overnights.” He looked around Kip’s room. “Nice quarters. You sure you want to give this up for a barracks?”

  Right. Because my life is so wonderful and easy. Kip let retorts dance behind his teeth, as if taking the jibe with good humor. “Enough of the easy life for me. I’m ready to buckle down and really start to work.”

  “Good. Well, let’s get to it, then,” Buskin said. He really was incredibly short. Even with his silly high shoes.

  Suddenly though, Kip really didn’t want to go with these two. There was something off. They hadn’t ever before been hostile to him. It was like something had worked them up. Had he done something to insult them? Maybe it was like his father had warned him: they disliked how easy it seemed he was getting a good life handed to him.

  Whatever it’s costing me, at least I’m coming out ahead of Lytos, whose parents made him a eunuch in hopes it would help him get into the Blackguard.

  And it was Kip’s first chance to get to take part in the search for his father himself, even if only tangentially.

  He grabbed his stuff. “Ready.”

  Chapter 65

  Teia and Cruxer ran into Winsen not a block from the safe house. Cruxer hesitated. They didn’t know Winsen as well as they knew each other, but he was in the squad.

  “We’ll need all the help we can get,” Teia said, but she let Cruxer make the call.

  “Someone’s going to try to kill Kip,” Cruxer told Winsen. “We’re heading to the docks to stop them.”

  Give Cruxer this: right or wrong, he made his decisions quickly. And his penchant for trusting people and believing in them might get him killed eventually, but it meant that the circle of people who liked him and wanted him to approve of them was always growing.

  Winsen blinked once. It was the closest to surprise Teia had ever seen from him. “Then you don’t want to go to the docks. I passed him not two minutes ago. He said he was going out bane hunting with Lytos and Buskin, but they’d told him to meet them in Little Hill. He was headed there.”

  “The slums? Why there and why go sepa—” Cruxer started to ask.

  “Fewer witnesses,” Teia said. “If they go out to sea and come back without him, they’ll be suspected. He meets them in a slum, they kill him, and if the deed itself isn’t witnessed, it’s clean.”

  Cruxer hesitated, appraising her. “Sometimes you scare me, Teia.”

  “I’ll get my bow,” Winsen said.

  “Be quick,” Cruxer said. As Winsen ran off, he breathed a curse. “Blackguards, Teia. How do we kill Blackguards?”

  “By surprising them,” she said.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know.”

  He looked at her and was suddenly just a boy again. “How could they?”

  “Ask it later. Captain.”

  The pain didn’t leave his eyes, but the boy in them receded. “Right,” he said. “Treat it like Specials. We could be wrong, so we follow as close as we can without being seen. If they’re guilty, we can expect them to be nervous. Teia, your paryl’s no good from a distance, so I want you to follow hard behind them. If you give us the signal, we’ll shoot. We see them draw weapons, we shoot.”

  “Got it,” Winsen said, rejoining them. He was wearing street clothes now, and holding not one but two bows. One was one of his yew longbows, a foot taller than he was, and the other was a simple recurve that he tossed to Cruxer.

  “If we do this, and we’re wrong,” Cruxer said, “we’ll look like traitors. It’ll be Orholam’s Glare for all of us. We don’t know that Breaker is who we think he is.”

  “We know him,” Teia said. “That’s enough for me.”

  “Me, too,” Cruxer said. “Winsen?”

  Winsen shrugged. As ever, he was a loaded musket. He didn’t care so much which direction he was pointed, so long as he could fire.

  “Then let’s go!” Cruxer said
.

  Without another word, they ran, heedless of who would wonder at them. Cruxer was tall enough that he appeared merely to be loping, though his gait forced Teia to run full out.

  When they got to Little Hill, they slowed. They walked briskly, but no faster than many merchants on their errands. With a wink and a smile, Cruxer got an old baker to tell them exactly when some Blackguards had passed through and where she thought they were going.

  They pushed faster than they would have if they were tracking anyone else. The likelihood of blundering over their prey at the speeds they were moving was high. But Buskin and Lytos didn’t know they were being hunted.

  The base of Little Hill was a Tyrean slum. Not precisely dangerous, at least during the day, but the neighborhood bore unmistakable signs of the origins of so many of its residents. Almost half the women wore long tunics over trousers, and the men wore strong green-and-black-patterned tunics, more shapeless than the tailored tunics most people favored on Big Jasper. Most notable, though, was that the domes on the buildings in this area were either perfunctorily small or had been hollowed out. The Tyreans liked to use their roofs as another room—an open room. Most of the hollowed-out domes, standing bare in their frames on flat roofs, at least at one time had shutters, which when closed retained the dome shape, but in their poverty, the people here didn’t fix such frippery when it failed.

  “Tssst!” Cruxer said.

  Teia saw his hand signals: two blocks ahead, then right. We’ll overwatch.

  There wasn’t time to see exactly what they planned. Teia jogged toward the corner. It started raining. She threw her hood up, and drew in as much paryl as she could hold. She stepped around the corner, nonchalant, just in case.

  Nothing.

  She moved down the narrow street at a half jog, as if hurrying from the rain. Dozens of others traversing the same street were doing the same. The only thing she could hope was that Lytos and Buskin were wearing their blacks so they’d be easy to spot.

  Throwing glances left and right as she passed intersection after intersection, Teia’s heart was beating harder and harder. With people ducking their heads and hurrying, it would make murdering Kip and getting away with it easier and easier.

  She heard a musket shot above her and jumped. No, not a musket, someone slamming shut a shutter against the rain. Broken stones and broken bones.

  There! She’d crossed one of the crooked alleys and caught a glimpse of black. No street in the city was supposed to be crooked. It made dark places where the light of the Thousand Stars couldn’t reach. But slums were slums the world over.

  She was only behind the Blackguards by about thirty paces now, and the alley cleared out. No one except Teia and her prey.

  And what am I supposed to do when I catch them?

  What if Lytos and Buskin were just here to get some gear for their trip? It wasn’t out of the question, was it? The Blackguards would have used supplies and weapons from their stores and safe houses near the docks first, but eventually those supplies would be exhausted, and they would have to dip into what they’d planted even in warehouses in the slums. Usually, slaves could do such work, but safe houses were kept secret.

  Maybe it was all innocent. Karris could be wrong, right?

  The sun was still high in the sky, but the clouds were so thick and black that it was getting dark. The rain became a full downpour, leaving Teia in a race between rising fears and wet-kitten hopes.

  She heard Kip’s voice and poked one eye around the corner.

  Too late.

  Lytos had drawn a knife, left side, unseen by Kip and was stepping—

  He dropped to one knee, almost gracefully, as if making obeisance, the barest whisper of arrow feathers disappearing fully into his armpit. He looked down, doubtless wondering what had happened, but it looked like he was bowing his head to Kip.

  “Lytos?” Kip asked, turning, all unaware of what had just happened.

  The ting of bare steel hitting a stone as Lytos dropped his blade made Buskin’s head pivot sharply. He saw Teia first, then saw Lytos pitch onto his face. The look on his face was pure guilt, then rage.

  His hand dipped to his belt where he kept his throwing knives. Being short and not strong, Buskin liked his throwing knives, and he was one of the few people Teia had ever seen for whom throwing knives were not an affectation.

  Teia’s hand was already up, but it wasn’t the familiar paryl that came through her. A wave bigger than her own body rushed through her and snapped like a whip at her fingers.

  All the world was fire. She dropped. Kip staggered. Buskin flinched in mid-throw, sending his knife into the sky even as he jumped backward, throwing his hand up over his face.

  The wave passed.

  Silence. They all looked at each other, staggered. No one was on fire.

  An arrow streaked through the space Buskin had been occupying not a heartbeat earlier and shattered against the stone wall beside him.

  The moment snapped; Buskin fled as if loosed from a bow himself.

  Kip was agog, looking at Teia and then himself, apparently wondering why he wasn’t on fire. “What th—”

  “Get him!” Teia shouted. She bolted after Buskin. Kip didn’t follow, at least not fast enough to be helpful.

  Buskin turned at the first intersection, his lead on Teia only thirty paces. Lightning crashed nearby, the frenetic flashing of multiple strikes coming at the same instant thunder rattled windows through all of Big Jasper. The lightning threw a shadow into the intersection. Faster than her conscious mind could grasp what she had seen, Teia reacted. Trap.

  She was already sprawling, slipping instead of jumping aside. Her feet skidded across rain-slick stones. One foot shot forward while the other went back. She slid, doing the splits, right past the corner. A glittering blade flashed right over her head.

  Buskin staggered, almost stepped on her as his blade didn’t meet the resistance he expected.

  On hands and feet, Teia scuttled backward. She twisted her wrist on an unseen stone and fell flat on her back.

  Buskin advanced, raising his sword for the killing—no wasteful, big, theatrical slash from a Blackguard; he would stab the point straight into her heart, twist quickly in case he’d pierced a little to the right or left, and be gone in less than a second’s time.

  But as he stepped forward, an arrow flashed past his face. He shot a glance back up the alley, must have seen Winsen or Cruxer or both, and leaped back and away. Teia shot paryl at him from her back, but it shattered easily with his rapid movement.

  She struggled to her feet and went after him. Lightning flashed again, this time farther away, hitting the great lightning-catchers above the Chromeria, the boom of thunder following a few heartbeats later. Teia found herself in a market. It was in an uproar. All the shoppers had already departed as soon as the rain began pounding, but the merchants were trapped, gathering their goods, trying to soothe panicking donkeys and oxen. Others were running around their shops, shuttering windows and pulling merchandise inside.

  In all the chaos, a lone runner was nearly invisible. Any other time, such a sight would stick out and cause outrage. Now it was one whitecap in a storm-tossed sea.

  A crash rang out as a cart lost all the barrels inside it. Teia saw Buskin running past it, having opened the back gate to loose the barrels. One giant barrel ruptured as it fell, and dumped its contents—olive oil—in a vast slick across the wet stones. Half a dozen pedestrians rushing past went down in tangles of limbs. A horse pulling an empty cart shied as its driver sawed on the reins, trying to avoid crushing the fallen. He lost grip of the reins, though—and it was a miracle he did. The horse, head free, looked down and quick-stepped over the people lying at its feet.

  But it turned aside to do so, and the wheels of its cart hit the slick and lost traction immediately, sliding the cart inexorably into the olive oil wagon—and blocking the lane entirely.

  Teia dodged into another pathway through the market, ran straight into a yo
ung woman and knocked her flat. Teia spun out of the collision, jumped over a rack of thobes that had fallen into the street, and kept going.

  Something lit the sky that wasn’t lightning, but as soon as Teia looked for the luxin strike, she plowed into someone else, much bigger than she was, and turned her eyes back to the market and her target.

  She made it to the edge of the market, just in time to see Buskin snatch up two burning lanterns and hurl them at the ground in the alley behind himself. One ignited, but the other didn’t—at least until he sprayed the alley with red luxin.

  The flames roared up, blocking the alley, and for half an instant Teia thought of trying to leap through the flames before good sense asserted itself. She barely stopped in time. The red luxin would gutter out in a minute at most, but that was too long. She didn’t know this part of town well enough to be certain that going one block to either side would take her back to Buskin’s path: she might get lucky and find that he’d turned the same way she did—or not.

  She was looking for another path, a way to climb around the flames, a window above them in the second story, anything, when Buskin’s flames died as if a giant had stomped on them, splattering liquid orange in every direction.

  A figure tore past her. Kip.

  He was drafting even as he ran. On top of the fire-smothering orange luxin, he threw down planks of green to give himself footing, and sprinted right across where the fires had been.

  His momentum carried him past Teia, who was standing still. He flicked off the spectacles that he was wearing, holstered them in the pouch he wore, and drew out another pair as he ran. He threw a hand up into the air and shot yellow symbols into the sky that dissolved into light even as they arced upward—directions for Cruxer and Winsen about where Buskin was going.

  Teia saw them running across a roof, each holding a bow, approaching an alley gap that was too far to jump. Cruxer sped up and leapt anyway—and made it. Winsen followed his lead, except he threw his hands and a gout of unfocused luxin out of them to give himself extra lift the way they’d practiced.